Spectacles

“The Grandmaster,” “Drinking Buddies,” “Our Nixon.”

In “The Grandmaster,” kung-fu warriors fight as the rain falls in torrents. It’s like a forties noir, but every raindrop in this movie appears to shine, by some digital-spiritual miracle, in iridescent glory. The writer-director Wong Kar-wai, in the past a maker of romantic-erotic drama (“Happy Together,” “In the Mood for Love”), has turned back to martial-arts movies, after reworking an early effort (“Ashes of Time”) that didn’t quite satisfy him. He has created a gorgeous, entirely aestheticized spectacle. The men fight at night, in chic black suits, crashing into doors and windows; the black-on-black color design, with its sparkle of water and broken glass, is a glamorous delight.

The movie begins in 1936, when the Japanese have moved into Manchuria, and China is on the edge of a murderous occupation. It is a time of reckoning—and of reconciliation, too. The severe martial-arts grand master of the north (Qingxiang Wang), his city occupied, arrives in Foshan, the southern center of kung fu, where he announces his retirement and allows his daughter Gong Er (Ziyi Zhang) to represent the north in a challenge match. Her opponent is the great fighter of the south—Ip Man (Tony Leung), an exponent of the Wing Chun style of fighting. “The Grandmaster” presents a series of ceremonious confrontations (all choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping, the grand master of movie fighting): the handsome, impervious Leung and the exquisite Zhang face each other silently, and rotate their hands into position—the solemn preliminaries are as momentous as the combat itself. As the two move into battle, slashing and spinning, often in closeup, the uninitiated may not be able to see much difference in method (Gong Er is a mistress of something called Bagua-style 64 Hands). The fight is a stunning whirl nonetheless; both the cinematography (by Philippe Le Sourd) and the editing (by Wong himself) have an indelible high excitement and precision.

Wong Kar-wai has taken much care with the authenticity of fighting style and décor, but authenticity and realism are two different things. Gong Er and Ip Man fight in a kind of upscale brothel, the Gold Pavilion, with colored-glass walls bordering highly confined spaces. They fight up and down a staircase and, in one tumbling moment, go over the railing in elegant slow motion. Later in the film, Ip Man takes on an assassin known as the Razor (Chen Chang), who turns out to be a modern dude in snazzy Western clothes—the two fly at each other like enraged pythons. “The Grandmaster” is a dreamily beautiful piece of historical mythmaking, and I enjoyed it, but I would be fooling if I said that the movie’s sonorous talk of great traditions of fighting and esoteric cults meant very much to me. I wish that in place of all this self-important puffing Wong Kar-wai had addressed certain obvious questions: What does unarmed fighting mean in the era of modern mechanized warfare? Did the various warriors play any role in the resistance to the Japanese occupation?

The movie carries Ip Man through the occupation and into a new life as a kung-fu teacher in Hong Kong in the nineteen-fifties. But the version released here has been seriously cut, and the film’s epic structure is now in ruins, with mysterious references and characters who appear out of nowhere. “The Grandmaster” is imperious but baffling, and I was nonplussed by the epilogue, which informs us grandly that Ip Man taught the movie star Bruce Lee, as if that were his crowning achievement. A superb martial discipline has ended in a commercial movie genre—not the worst fate in the world, but the comic irony of it is of little interest to a director bent on glorification.

In Joe Swanberg’s “Drinking Buddies,” a group of young Chicago brewery workers labor together, hang out together, and drink beer—they drink it at lunch, at dinner, even at breakfast. Beer is the medium in which they live. The hops-enhanced, slightly giddy sociability is a large part of what the movie is about, though we can see, amid all the teasing and jostling, that something serious is going on: Luke (Jake Johnson), a smart, funny guy with a bushy black beard and penetrating dark eyes, can’t stop looking at Kate (Olivia Wilde), the startlingly beautiful woman who does the promotional work for the brewery. Luke and Kate have the same kind of humor, the same self-deflating irony. They are soul mates but not bedmates: Luke lives with the anxious Jill (Anna Kendrick), who very much wants to marry him; Kate’s boyfriend, Chris (Ron Livingston), a rather taciturn music producer, awaits her appearance at his apartment after work. The situation is unstable, especially after Chris pulls away from Kate, leaving her free. Will the two people who are obviously right for each other get together?

Joe Swanberg, the speedy up-from-mumblecore filmmaker (fifteen features in eight years), has become adept at establishing a small group of characters within a larger social setting. “Drinking Buddies” is a portrait of life in the middle. The people in this film, neither rich nor poor, work hard but have no apparent ambitions, no children, no ideas, no obligations that we can see except to one another. Swanberg moves smoothly and gently through their lives, and his camera (Ben Richardson is the cinematographer), hanging close but not too close, is remarkably sensitive to the distance that determines mood. Swanberg has become a very capable low-key director; the performance he coaxes out of Olivia Wilde as the irresolute, slightly self-damaging Kate is particularly touching.

I feel strongly, however, that the improvisational method used here, and in many other low-budget films, is more a handicap than a strength. On location for “Drinking Buddies,” Swanberg set out a general idea of what he wanted to accomplish in a scene, and then let the actors work out the details. Much of the conversational space—this can’t be a surprise—is filled with hesitations, backing and filling, plans to talk about something another time. “Drinking Buddies” is more about behavior than about character: the movie is expressive as a re-creation of moment-by-moment dithering but inept at revealing the fundaments that drive people to act the way they do. We want to know more about this crew—the things that a good screenwriter would tell us, or at least hint at. We want to know why the moody, opaque Chris leaves Kate. And whether Kate wants to go to bed with Luke. Or how she feels about Luke’s girlfriend Jill. And so on.

Some of my critical colleagues have celebrated this uncertainty as a profound observation of life as we live it now, but I wonder if it isn’t produced—determined, really—by the directorial method that Swanberg has chosen. By using improvisation, he’s trying to avoid banality, of course, but the emotional reticence of an unwritten script condemns the movie to minor status. In Chekhov’s plays, people hesitate and dissemble and speak nonsense and trip all over themselves, but they do eventually blurt out what they’re feeling. Citing Chekhov at this early time in Swanberg’s career may be unfair, but an amiable movie like “Drinking Buddies” cries out for the revelations that a great dramatist—or even a talented screenwriter and director working together—can give us.

Watergate has never really gone away for those of us who lived through it, and, in Penny Lane’s “Our Nixon,” a shrewdly edited collection of news footage and “home movies” taken by members of the Nixon White House staff, there they are again, our familiars: Dwight Chapin, the clean-cut, stolid special assistant who hired the dirty trickster Donald Segretti; the chief of staff, H. R. (Bob) Haldeman, calculating, bland, inarticulate, with a malevolent upper lip and a forced bright smile; John Ehrlichman, fraudulent, ironic, the most intelligent member of this semi-fascist apparat; and the President himself, at times masterful, at other times desperate, alcoholic, and sad. Most of the footage taken by the staff is of no distinction—the two Inaugurations, state visits to Italy and China, and the like. One moment, long forgotten, stands out: at a White House entertainment in 1972, as the Vietnam War is raging, a female vocalist with the super-square Ray Conniff Singers holds up a protest sign and says, into a mike, “President Nixon, stop bombing human beings, animals, and vegetation.” The singer, Carole Feraci, unnamed in the movie, is an obscure, noble claimant to immortality.

Stuck with this mostly ordinary tourist stuff, Penny Lane resorted to the Oval Office audiotapes, especially the late-night telephone calls, when Nixon, deep in Watergate and seeking reassurance from his henchmen that all is well, finally runs into a brick wall: Ehrlichman tells him that, yes, he did inform the President about the existence of the secret police force, the Plumbers, and the Plumbers’ theft of medical records belonging to Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Nixon insists that he knows nothing, stops, loses his way, and then, realizing that his staff will no longer take the fall for him, collapses into an embarrassed silence (both Haldeman and Ehrlichman were fired soon afterward). This moment is as devastating an impression of a powerful man facing the end as we are ever likely to have. ♦

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